I have a friend who is a successful businessman, knows several languages, is creatively endowed and has good ideas about how to treat women. Yet he was married for many years to a woman who was horrible to him.

I get angry when such things happen. There are so many good women in terrible situations; yet when someone good comes along some complete jerk of a woman appropriates him and treats him like dirt. This is the kind of behaviour that feeds misogyny. Men
look at the experience of people such as my friend and say, “See, we told you, women are evil and should be battered.” This does not affect the guilty women. It affects women whom these men have in their lives, most of whom are completely innocent.

Whenever a woman does something wrong, it leads to people generalizing it on all women. That is completely wrong. Women are not a unified entity. As with men, there are good ones and there are bad ones. Good ones do not deserve to suffer for the sins of
bad ones. They had no influence on the guilty; they have nothing to do with the guilty; they are not responsible for their misdeeds.

My daughter is not Andrea Dworkin or Catherine McKinnon, and I refuse for her to be conflated with people such as these. She is not responsible for their behaviour. Similarly I, as a Jew, am not responsible for the actions of Karl Marx or Harvey
Weinstein. I refuse to be blamed for the actions of people over whom I have had no influence. And I refuse for my daughter to be blamed for the actions of people over whom she had no influence.

With women, as with men, there are good ones and there are bad ones. Anything capable of choice regardless of gender can be good or bad. I want to see better women getting together with better men and forming good relationships with one another. And I
want to see both men who want to be ugly to women and women who want to be ugly to men being confronted and made to change their ways.

My friend divorced his horrible partner and married a good woman from Russia. Apparently their marriage is great. Russian women know very well what men who are actually bad are like, and they are likely to appreciate a good man like my friend. I want to
influence more men from feminist cultures to get together with women from places such as Russia. That way, they will both have better relationships than they stand to have at home. And the more people do this, the more there will be an incentive on the
offending gender to improve their treatment of the other gender – or else see the other gender leave in large numbers to be with people who are willing to be good to them.

It makes sense to side neither with men against women nor with women against men. It makes sense to support men and women who are willing to act wisely and kindly and confront men and women who aren’t. Neither men nor women are good or bad. They are
beings of choice. And anything capable of choice is capable of right choices and wrong choices.

So I want to see good men get together with good women and have good relationships. And I want to see bad men and bad women be confronted on their behaviour and have to change their ways.

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